instances of negligence and mischief and sheer accident—­of everything, in fact, which can hasten the ruin of a house devoured by so many mouths.  Upstairs in Madame’s quarters destruction raged more fiercely still.  Dresses, which cost ten thousand francs and had been twice worn, were sold by Zoe; jewels vanished as though they had crumbled deep down in their drawers; stupid purchases were made; every novelty of the day was brought and left to lie forgotten in some corner the morning after or swept up by ragpickers in the street.  She could not see any very expensive object without wanting to possess it, and so she constantly surrounded herself with the wrecks of bouquets and costly knickknacks and was the happier the more her passing fancy cost.  Nothing remained intact in her hands; she broke everything, and this object withered, and that grew dirty in the clasp of her lithe white fingers.  A perfect heap of nameless debris, of twisted shreds and muddy rags, followed her and marked her passage.  Then amid this utter squandering of pocket money cropped up a question about the big bills and their settlement.  Twenty thousand francs were due to the modiste, thirty thousand to the linen draper, twelve thousand to the bootmaker.  Her stable devoured fifty thousand for her, and in six months she ran up a bill of a hundred and twenty thousand francs at her ladies’ tailor.  Though she had not enlarged her scheme of expenditure, which Labordette reckoned at four hundred thousand francs on an average, she ran up that same year to a million.  She was herself stupefied by the amount and was unable to tell whither such a sum could have gone.  Heaps upon heaps of men, barrowfuls of gold, failed to stop up the hole, which, amid this ruinous luxury, continually gaped under the floor of her house.

Meanwhile Nana had cherished her latest caprice.  Once more exercised by the notion that her room needed redoing, she fancied she had hit on something at last.  The room should be done in velvet of the color of tea roses, with silver buttons and golden cords, tassels and fringes, and the hangings should be caught up to the ceiling after the manner of a tent.  This arrangement ought to be both rich and tender, she thought, and would form a splendid background to her blonde vermeil-tinted skin.  However, the bedroom was only designed to serve as a setting to the bed, which was to be a dazzling affair, a prodigy.  Nana meditated a bed such as had never before existed; it was to be a throne, an altar, whither Paris was to come in order to adore her sovereign nudity.  It was to be all in gold and silver beaten work—­it should suggest a great piece of jewelry with its golden roses climbing on a trelliswork of silver.  On the headboard a band of Loves should peep forth laughing from amid the flowers, as though they were watching the voluptuous dalliance within the shadow of the bed curtains.  Nana had applied to Labordette who had brought two goldsmiths to see her.  They were already busy with the designs.  The bed would cost fifty thousand francs, and Muffat was to give it her as a New Year’s present.